"This book looks at twenty-six houses by an international roster of contemporary architects"--P. [4] of cover.

Sexuality and gender have long been influential in understanding the construction of domestic space, its meanings, often revealing a binary division of private and public, female and male. By reconstructing the foundation of queer critiques of space and by analyzing the representation of domesticity in contemporary art and architecture, Unplanned Visitors shows the blurring of private and public that can occur in any domestic space and explores the potential of queer theory for understanding, and designing, the built environment. Olivier Vallerand investigates how queer critiques, building on pioneering feminist work, question the relation between identity and architecture and highlight normative constructs underlying domestic spaces. He draws out a genealogy of queer space in theoretical discourse in architecture, studying projects by Mark Robbins, Joel Sanders, J Mayer H, Elmgreen & Dragset, Andrés Jaque, and MYCKET, among others. These works blur the traditional borders between architecture and art to emphasize the tensions between private and public and their impact on assumptions about domestic space and family structure. The challenges in moving from experimental installations to built environments suggest how designers must acknowledge and respond to the social contexts that shape architecture, rethinking how domestic spaces can be designed to allow everyone to better manage the expression of their self-identification through their living environments. Unplanned Visitors poses a challenge to traditional architectural theory and history, but also suggests a renewed and more inclusive ethics whereby designers explicitly address social and political power structures. The potential of a queer approach to architectural design, history, theory, and education is precisely to enact a method that creates more inclusive buildings and safer neighbourhoods for everyone.

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

The hawari of Cairo - narrow non-straight alleyways - are the basic urban units that have formed the medieval city since its foundation back in 969 AD. Until early in the C20th, they made up the primary urban divisions of the city and were residential in nature. Contemporary hawari, by contrast, are increasingly dominated by commercial and industrial activity. This medieval urban maze of extremely short, broken, zigzag streets and dead ends are defensible territories, powerful institutions, and important social systems. While the hawari have been studied as an exemplar for urban structure of medieval Islamic urbanism, and as individual building typologies, this book is the first to examine in detail the socio-spatial practice of the architecture of home in the city. It investigates how people live, communicate and relate to each other within their houses or shared spaces of the alleys, and in doing so, to uncover several new socio-spatial dimensions and meanings in this architectural form. In an attempt to re-establish the link between architecture past and present, and to understand the changing social needs of communities, this book uncovers the notion of home as central to understand architecture in such a city with long history as Cairo. It firstly describes the historical development of the domestic spaces (indoor and outdoor), and provides an inclusive analysis of spaces of everyday activities in the hawari of old Cairo. It then broadens its analysis to other parts of the city, highlighting different customs and representations of home in the city at large. Cairo, in the context of this book, is represented as the most sophisticated urban centre in the Middle East with different and sometimes contrasting approaches to the architecture of home, as a practice and spatial system. In order to analyse the complexity and interconnectedness of the components and elements of the hawari as a 'collective home', it layers its narratives of architectural and social developments as a domestic environment over the past two hundred years, and in doing so, explores the in-depth social meaning and performance of spaces, both private and public.

DIVHistorical and theoretical essays on television and media culture by a leading feminist studies scholar./div

A collection of thought-provoking essays on the changing face of domestic architecture over two centuries, highlighting the wide range of source materials and theoretical perspectives available to scholars of architectural history.

The private single family house is still very much the preferred choice of home. Yet in recent years there have been many changes not only in the personal situations of the residents, their expectations and desires, but also in the rising costs of energy and raw materials. This has meant that issues such as multi-functionalism, the use of innovative building materials or energy-efficient building methods are increasing in significance. In this completely revised and expanded second edition these topical developments have been taken into consideration. The organisation and layout of the first volume, with its concise and detailed project documentation, has been retained. The authors introduce floor plan solutions using contemporary projects which bear in mind changing family structures. At the same time, the contributions provide an in-depth introduction to planning single family houses, from the design of the floor plan to useful tips for the realisation. In addition to this fundamental information, 22 projects are documented, providing ideas and inspiration for planners, students and clients. The international selection of projects highlights current trends in planning and designing single family housing and reveals the tried and tested basics.